Release date is 2025-12-18

Albert László from page images generously made available by the Hungarian Electronic Library

"Szeptember" by Zoltán Ambrus is a novel written in the late 19th century. It traces the life of the gentle lyric poet Hódy Balázs, whose art and fate are bound to his unrequited worship of the radiant Sárváryné, while foreshadowing a later, quieter attachment to Fodor Ella. The tone blends irony and tenderness as it dissects bourgeois mores, male vanity, and the idealization of women.

The opening of the novel begins with a witty “cherchez la femme” overture that surveys duels, financial ruin, and crime, then turns the aphorism on its head by presenting the one figure no one “looks for the woman” behind: the lyric poet. It recounts Hódy Balázs’s history—meeting the serene Borcsa (Sárváryné) while tutoring her brother, falling hopelessly in love, watching her marry the artist Sárváry and bear a troop of sons, and pouring his longing into cycles like Ginevra, Spleen, and Rejtelmek. Drawn into the household as a kind of tutor-companion, he lives in chaste proximity, resents the husband’s nightlife, then endures Borcsa’s decline and death, attempts suicide, and finally survives by transfiguring memory into song. The narrative then shifts into Part II, “Csöndes bolondok,” where Balázs, hunting a room, blunders into the chaotic Fodor household and first sees little Ella during a comic bath-time scene, meeting the brusque Fodorné and the red-bearded Fodor amid clutter—the point at which the excerpt breaks. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Budapest: Athenaeum, 1897